7 ms·

Struggling Six Apart Begged for $2M Loan

67 points by percept 16y ago

drusenko 16y ago
"One fifth of Six Apart’s portion will go to executives Ben Trott (who founded the company with his wife, Mena), Andrew Anker and Jeff Ash. The rest is distributed among the rest of the Six Apart’s shareholders." If my math is correct, that means the founder gets $3.9M * 1/5 * 1/3 * 0.75 = roughly $200k post-tax. Ouch.
- nikcub 16y ago
  I can't find the source right now, but I remember it being mentioned that the founders took some cash off the table during the first big funding round.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    Sucks for the investors. $22M in and less than $3M out.
- n2linux 16y ago
  Would that number be any less if Six Apart took the $2M bridge loan?
nikcub 16y ago
Amazing, especially considering that during the early Web 2.0 days most people cited Six Apart as being the IPO candidate that will rejuvenate the tech market. How did Six Apart screw up: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Six-Apart-screw-up http://www.quora.com/How-did-Six-Apart-screw-up
techtalsky 16y ago
This is actually really sad for me. Mena Trott and I were kind of bloggy friends back in the day when I ran "the tinyblog", and she ran "Dollarshort". We were two pretty darn early bloggers and it was still a small ecosystem. One day she told me that Ben was going to turn the custom blogging tool he wrote for her into a product and wanted to know if I wanted to try installing it myself, with Ben supporting me over IM. That installation (many times upgraded) is possibly the 2nd oldest Movable Type installation after Mena's. I was overjoyed at their success and a little sad to see WordPress eventually eat their lunch and their other product fail to gain traction. I wish them success in all their future endeavors.
gregpilling 16y ago
What do think the role of Fantastico and other easy-install scripts had? Given a choice of a one-click install or download-upload-untar I usually chose the easy path myself anytime I would be setting up a quickie blog or site.
lusis 16y ago
IIRC, the biggest reason people moved away from MT was the licensing issue. I know it's why I did. It's sad to see the downfall, though.
variety 16y ago
Hate to say this, but reading that article made me feel like I was reading Foursquare's obituary, 3 years from now.
- callmeed 16y ago
  So who is WordPress in this future vision?
  - sewerhorse 16y ago
    Probably Facebook Places or Twitter Places
  - variety 16y ago
    Or Zagat, or Yelp -- or anyone willing to setup up to the task of answering simple, pertinent questions like "how do I find a decent Thai restaurant nearby that's open at this hour?" seriously. Trophy cases for badges. Jeez.
staunch 16y ago
Sucks for Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal). They bought his company for stock (I think) then sold it for $25M cash to a Russian company (which users hated I believe). Now he's probably got a pittance of stock in Say Media, which will also probably fail. Lesson: get cash or public company stock.
netaustin 16y ago
I always wonder, in cases like this, about the role that the underlying technology plays. Wordpress's choice of PHP meant that installation was easy, theming/modification was easy, and it would work on your crappy shared host with FTP access. In fact, that's why I used Wordpress, back in '04 or '05. Because I couldn't get MT working properly on Powweb. For a platform that needs to be ubiquitous to succeed, I guess you really need a ubiquitous programming language. I can't even guess how many tools I never investigated because they required language or library support that I didn't have installed. One failed "port install" in the whole dependency and I will probably have to give up. Maybe MT's failure to catch on had nothing to do with Six Apart's failure to catch on. Still fun to think about.
earl 16y ago
In the 2003 to 2007 period, a couple of blogs I follow (whatever.scalzi.com , Brad Delong) all had constant technical problems with MT. http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004350.html http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004350.html http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/03/15/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/03/15/ Or BradD, who has no fewer than EIGHT MT installs to try to get their shit software to work. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/10/housekeeping-mo.html http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/10/housekeeping-mo.html Wordpress won because, reason 0, it actually worked and didn't break all the fucking time. Particularly for enduser software, people severely underrate code that isn't brittle shit that breaks if you look at it cross eyed.
- callmeed 16y ago
  I'm not that familiar with MT–does it break because of it's code or because of how it's setup/deployed with Perl? I agree with your point, but I think being built on PHP was also a big factor in WP winning.
  - nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
    From my own experience in trying to set it up, the hardest part for me was setting it up to correctly generate all the static HTML pages and get them to correctly post to Perl CGI forms for things like comments that would then trigger a regeneration of the static HTML. It always struck me as an extremely fragile setup. Oh, and the theming ecosystem was non-existent compared to Wordpress.
petervandijck 16y ago
That company would make an awesome case study. Where did they go wrong, exactly? My take: they tried to move (unsuccessfully) into social networking etc., and pretty much abandoned the blogging space into the hands of WP. That, and just plain bad tech choices, like generating static pages which meant that your entire site had to be rebuilt after each blog post. And bad licensing choices.
micrypt 16y ago
What if Pownce hadn't sold and stayed open...
ck2 16y ago
The sad part is MovableType is almost solely responsible for WordPress's dumbfounding success. If MT had not suddenly decided to go pay-only for version 3, it would not have made tens of thousands of people start looking for an alternative and there was WP 2.0 alpha/beta, a fork of b2/cafelog, one of the few open-source programs ready to take them on. MT went open-source for version 4 but it was too late. Otherwise WP would have been just one of the many PHP based blog programs out there today with a small following, and many of us might still be struggling to code in Perl for MT instead of PHP. I for one do not miss Perl at all, but believe it or not there is at least one website out there I made still running MT 2.66 from 2003!

67 points by percept 16y ago

"One fifth of Six Apart’s portion will go to executives Ben Trott (who founded the company with his wife, Mena), Andrew Anker and Jeff Ash. The rest is distributed among the rest of the Six Apart’s shareholders." If my math is correct, that means the founder gets $3.9M * 1/5 * 1/3 * 0.75 = roughly $200k post-tax. Ouch.

nikcub 16y ago
I can't find the source right now, but I remember it being mentioned that the founders took some cash off the table during the first big funding round.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Sucks for the investors. $22M in and less than $3M out.
n2linux 16y ago
Would that number be any less if Six Apart took the $2M bridge loan?

nikcub 16y ago

Amazing, especially considering that during the early Web 2.0 days most people cited Six Apart as being the IPO candidate that will rejuvenate the tech market. How did Six Apart screw up: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Six-Apart-screw-up http://www.quora.com/How-did-Six-Apart-screw-up

techtalsky 16y ago

This is actually really sad for me. Mena Trott and I were kind of bloggy friends back in the day when I ran "the tinyblog", and she ran "Dollarshort". We were two pretty darn early bloggers and it was still a small ecosystem. One day she told me that Ben was going to turn the custom blogging tool he wrote for her into a product and wanted to know if I wanted to try installing it myself, with Ben supporting me over IM. That installation (many times upgraded) is possibly the 2nd oldest Movable Type installation after Mena's. I was overjoyed at their success and a little sad to see WordPress eventually eat their lunch and their other product fail to gain traction. I wish them success in all their future endeavors.

gregpilling 16y ago

What do think the role of Fantastico and other easy-install scripts had? Given a choice of a one-click install or download-upload-untar I usually chose the easy path myself anytime I would be setting up a quickie blog or site.

lusis 16y ago

IIRC, the biggest reason people moved away from MT was the licensing issue. I know it's why I did. It's sad to see the downfall, though.

variety 16y ago

Hate to say this, but reading that article made me feel like I was reading Foursquare's obituary, 3 years from now.

callmeed 16y ago
So who is WordPress in this future vision?
- sewerhorse 16y ago
  Probably Facebook Places or Twitter Places
- variety 16y ago
  Or Zagat, or Yelp -- or anyone willing to setup up to the task of answering simple, pertinent questions like "how do I find a decent Thai restaurant nearby that's open at this hour?" seriously. Trophy cases for badges. Jeez.

staunch 16y ago

Sucks for Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal). They bought his company for stock (I think) then sold it for $25M cash to a Russian company (which users hated I believe). Now he's probably got a pittance of stock in Say Media, which will also probably fail. Lesson: get cash or public company stock.

netaustin 16y ago

I always wonder, in cases like this, about the role that the underlying technology plays. Wordpress's choice of PHP meant that installation was easy, theming/modification was easy, and it would work on your crappy shared host with FTP access. In fact, that's why I used Wordpress, back in '04 or '05. Because I couldn't get MT working properly on Powweb. For a platform that needs to be ubiquitous to succeed, I guess you really need a ubiquitous programming language. I can't even guess how many tools I never investigated because they required language or library support that I didn't have installed. One failed "port install" in the whole dependency and I will probably have to give up. Maybe MT's failure to catch on had nothing to do with Six Apart's failure to catch on. Still fun to think about.

earl 16y ago

In the 2003 to 2007 period, a couple of blogs I follow (whatever.scalzi.com , Brad Delong) all had constant technical problems with MT. http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004350.html http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004350.html http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/03/15/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/03/15/ Or BradD, who has no fewer than EIGHT MT installs to try to get their shit software to work. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/10/housekeeping-mo.html http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/10/housekeeping-mo.html Wordpress won because, reason 0, it actually worked and didn't break all the fucking time. Particularly for enduser software, people severely underrate code that isn't brittle shit that breaks if you look at it cross eyed.

callmeed 16y ago
I'm not that familiar with MT–does it break because of it's code or because of how it's setup/deployed with Perl? I agree with your point, but I think being built on PHP was also a big factor in WP winning.
- nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
  From my own experience in trying to set it up, the hardest part for me was setting it up to correctly generate all the static HTML pages and get them to correctly post to Perl CGI forms for things like comments that would then trigger a regeneration of the static HTML. It always struck me as an extremely fragile setup. Oh, and the theming ecosystem was non-existent compared to Wordpress.

petervandijck 16y ago

That company would make an awesome case study. Where did they go wrong, exactly? My take: they tried to move (unsuccessfully) into social networking etc., and pretty much abandoned the blogging space into the hands of WP. That, and just plain bad tech choices, like generating static pages which meant that your entire site had to be rebuilt after each blog post. And bad licensing choices.

micrypt 16y ago

What if Pownce hadn't sold and stayed open...

ck2 16y ago

The sad part is MovableType is almost solely responsible for WordPress's dumbfounding success. If MT had not suddenly decided to go pay-only for version 3, it would not have made tens of thousands of people start looking for an alternative and there was WP 2.0 alpha/beta, a fork of b2/cafelog, one of the few open-source programs ready to take them on. MT went open-source for version 4 but it was too late. Otherwise WP would have been just one of the many PHP based blog programs out there today with a small following, and many of us might still be struggling to code in Perl for MT instead of PHP. I for one do not miss Perl at all, but believe it or not there is at least one website out there I made still running MT 2.66 from 2003!